Magazine Puts Tastes To The Test

Mixed Grill

November 19, 2003|By PRUE SALASKY Daily Press

For a confessed chocoholic, the assignment of participating in a tasting of bittersweet chocolate sauces, on-site at "Cook's Illustrated" magazine, was nothing short of intoxicating. Our session was but one of a series of tastings conducted over several weeks to determine the best, fail-safe chocolate sauce with the widest appeal. The assignment gave a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the workings of a top-notch test kitchen, as well as a basic how-to for conducting a taste test.

Participants in the recent American Food Journalists' annual conference were invited, in two batches of 20, to make their way across town to the Boston offices of "America's Test Kitchen" as -- mostly -- willing guinea pigs. An unmarked door, next to a yoga studio, directly across from a "T" station for the city's underground train, leads visitors to a steep set of stairs and into the newly remodeled kitchen, which serves the magazine and its spin-off books for recipe testing.

The gleaming 2,500-square-foot kitchen, which has special heat-sealed flooring, a multitude of cherry cabinets, nine gas and two electric ranges, eight refrigerator-freezers, a walk-in and 17 ovens, doubles as a TV studio for the "America's Test Kitchen" series.

For outdoor shoots, the neighboring alley, carpeted in fake grass, sets the scene for grilling takes. The series, filmed in two sessions a day over a three-week period, is now in its third season airing on public television stations nationwide.

The magazine, which accepts no advertising, has built a reputation, under the leadership of Christopher Kimball, for culinary integrity based on painstakingly detailed research and mind-numbing trial-and-error repetitions by a staff of 15 test cooks.

"We figure out what people will do and cut them off at the pass," says Kimball, whose experimentation extends to using the wrong size cookware, and incorrect cooking times and temperatures to ensure that the final recipes are as durable as possible.

He considers cooking times useless for the home cook. Instead Kimball prefers to offer visual clues. Everything is tested with the home kitchen in mind. To that end, ingredients are measured rather than weighed, and the staff uses a variety of cookware -- and conventional rather than convection ovens.

The development of most recipes takes six weeks, though some may take months. The most difficult recipe he's developed to date, says Kimball, was the one for chocolate chip cookies. "Cookies are hard because the slightest thing makes a difference," he says, likening each recipe and story to "a little detective story." Some, like the vegan chocolate cake under the microscope on our visit, may never pass muster and make it into the public domain.

On this day, our job was to taste 10 chocolate sauces, including one duplicate as a benchmark, and rate them according to four criteria: sweetness, smoothness, creaminess and complexity. We were told that the purpose was to identify the effect of one mystery ingredient on tasters' perceptions of the sauces. After the tasting, Kimball revealed the variable ingredient to be sugar. A more analytical taster, less swayed by the sight of 10 delectable chocolate servings, might have figured this out when the marks for smoothness and creaminess kept to a constant perfect "10" throughout.

After taking our seats, each at a place set with 10 numbered sauces, a single plastic spoon, and a glass of seltzer water, we were asked for silence, so as not to sway our neighbors in any way. The tasting director, Julia Davison, then instructed us to taste the sauces in order, sipping water in between to cleanse our palates.

In other sessions, she said, they varied the order of the samples, so as to minimize the effects of "palate fatigue." We were instructed to rate the four characteristics listed after just one sample.

We were then asked to go back and compare each sample and rate them according to preference. The judging sheets also allowed room for individual comments.

Though some tasters were laboring by the seventh spoonful, I was going back to each sample with glee, scraping the edges of the too-small containers.

There was just one sauce I didn't care for, the one using the chocolate, Lindt Surfine Chocolate, with the lowest percentage of cocoa at 50 percent and therefore the blandest taste. Ghirardelli Bittersweet Chocolate Premium Baking Bar, the chocolate favored by the largest number of people generally, according to Davison, was the duplicate entry. It erred towards the bland side, I thought.

Davison noted that when the staff conducted the preliminary tastings, they sampled the nine different chocolates represented in a trio of formats: raw, as in a chocolate bar, in a sauce and in a cake.

(Gym membership is included in their salaries, and some work out twice a day to counteract the effects of sometimes tasting as many as 65 different samples in a day.) Before leaving for Boston to sign up for a job there, though, consider that recent tastings have included variations of mayonnaise, vinegar and salt.

For information and access to 10 years of "Cook's Illustrated," go to the Web site at www.cooks illustrated.com. Some information is free for browsing; the bulk is reserved for members only, $3.95 monthly or $24.95 annually.

Prue Salasky can be reached at 247-4784 or by e-mail at psalasky@dailypress.com.